Body found in Douglas Street fire Updated

You may not call him a hero but Christopher Tignanelli’s quick thinking Thursday afternoon prevented a tragic situation from turning into a disaster.

Tignanelli was sitting down to his computer at his Douglas Street apartment just after his son had arrived home from school when he heard a buzzer in the hallway, realising that it was the fire alarm he grabbed his son Matthew and vacated the premises, but not before warning his neighbours.

“We just grabbed our shoes and ran out … no coats or anything, just our shoes because getting out is the most important thing.”

“I knew my neighbour was home because I saw her come in when I was waiting for my son to come home,” he explains.

Tignanelli says once they were out in the front of the building his neighbour saw smoke coming from the back of the building, so he went back to his apartment grabbed his phone and called 911.

“I don’t really know anyone in the building so I didn’t know who was still left inside,” he says.

“So I just went and started ringing all the buzzers … I held them for a long time so everyone knew this was the real thing and they could get out of the building.”

Sergeant Chuck Seguin with the North Bay City Police has confirmed with BayToday that there was on fatality at a Douglas Street apartment Thursday afternoon.

Seguin says the blaze broke out in the 820 Douglas Street apartment building at 4:20 p.m. with the North Bay Fire Department responding first. He says once the fire was extinguished fire crews discovered the body in the ground-level apartment and called in police.

Confirming that Ident Technical Services, the Ontario Fire Marshal and coroner are on scene, Seguin says it is too early in the investigation to speculate was the cause of the fire or to determine the cause of death.